


Swallow the Wave

by ssstrychnine



Category: The Walking Dead (TV), The Walking Dead - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Zombies, F/M, in which I take the normal setting and make it cuter part two
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-17
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-02-25 20:04:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 9,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2634506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daryl works at a paintball facility. Carol is a mouse. Neither of these things will be true by the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

_We started out sipping the water_  
 _And now we try to swallow the wave_  
 _And we try not to let those bastards get us down_  
 _We don't worry anymore cause we know when the guff comes we get brave_  
 _After all, look around_  
 _It's happening, it's happening, it's happening now_  
 **_Fiona Apple - Anything We Want_ **

 

It’s the end of the world. Daryl’s head is a hive of bees and it’s 87 degrees out and he’s working in the beating sun. He can still taste whiskey at the back of his throat and his fingers smell like too many cigarettes and he’s a second away from vomiting it all up. The drinks and the crappy burritos they’d got at wherever-was-open-at-three-in-the-morning. Merle did it on purpose, he thinks, got him drunk on a Sunday during school holidays. And then he sees that morning’s group. It’s twenty kids and five adults and Daryl remembers that one of them’s a cop and the birthday boy has a fucking sheriff’s hat on and Merle _definitely_ did this on purpose. They’re doing the zombie run too which means he’ll be filthy and hoarse as well as hungover when they’re done. It’s the end of the world and he’ll be damned if he’s having anything to do with it. 

“I’m not touchin’ this one,” he tells Michonne who is leaning against the counter, smiling at the horde of children heading towards them. 

“You knew this was coming,” she says easily and next to her Andrea laughs.

“I forgot about the cop. Cops don’t...like me.” 

“What a surprise.” 

“I don’t like them neither.”

“ _That_ doesn't surprise me at all.” 

“Fuck you,” Daryl mutters half-heartedly. The children are getting closer, it’s almost time for one of the staff to march across the gravel, arm outstretched, shake the hand of the cop, make nice with the kids. Merle was laughing into his coffee somewhere, Daryl knew it. “I’ll do the afternoon group.”

“You’ll do the _fraternity_?” Andrea snorts. “Deal, I’ll take the kids.”

“And you can cover my team building group tomorrow too,” Michonne adds.

Daryl is silent, watches the children with narrowed eyes. They’ll latch onto him, he knows they will, they’re all around twelve, mostly boys, and ready to do some violence. He knows he looks like exactly the sort to teach them. Usually he wouldn't mind, he actually sort of likes kids, they don’t expect the same sorts of things from him as adults do, but today his skin feels particularly delicate and he’s sure there’s alcohol seeping out of his pores and he doesn't want to be the guy who might be a little bit drunk still, supervising a cop’s child and his friends while they use dangerous weapons.

“Deal,” he says.

So while the girls go through permission slips and rules and responsibility waivers and the children shriek and form ruthlessly selective teams, Daryl slinks out the back to smoke. Merle would be pissed, he thinks, Merle would want him front and centre, breathing his hangover-stale breath on _Rick Grimes_ , the cop, and his birthday boy. Merle who is safe, _working from home_ , he says, though how you can work from home when your job is at an outdoor paintball arena, Daryl will never know, but Merle _is_ the manager. Angrily he stubs out his cigarette and sweeps the butt off the edge of the deck with his foot. 

Michonne and Andrea herd the kids out back to the zombie run field. There they’ll be split into three groups, the red team, the blue team, and the zombies. The zombies get to smear themselves in paint and fake blood (and helmets and padded vests) and lurch around groaning and moaning with one of the girls (probably Michonne, she’s good with zombies), but they don’t get guns, just messy handfuls of paint. And they can’t be killed. The two teams are armed with paintball guns and body armour and a limited supply of ammo and Andrea keeps an eye on them. The two teams are enemies but zombies hate indiscriminately and the teams charge from opposite ends toward the middle of a long, zombie-infested paddock, over hills and ditches and up towers and behind walls to get a flag in the centre and hustle it back to base. If a zombie “eats” you you’re out and if the enemy team shoots you you’re out. And then the teams swap around when they run out of ammo so everyone gets to be a zombie. It’s a game built for savages and adults get into it almost as much as kids and are usually far more ruthless. Daryl sort of loves it. But not today.

He stays at the small reception area by the gravel and dirt carpark. He smokes, he sorts the padded vests into their proper sizes, he cleans out the guns that have been choked up with paint. There’s a woman there too, one of the cop’s group, pacing back and forward beside a car. He keeps an eye on her because she’s acting strange. She’s twitchy and harried, like there’s someone in the air only she can see, a person she’s afraid of. He watches her too because she’s nice to look at. Small, bird-boned, with short, wispy curls of light grey hair. She looks like a person to wrap up in cotton wool and keep on a shelf. The last person you’d expect to see at a paintball arena, even sitting it out. She keeps checking her watch and tugging at her clothing which is loose, plain, practical, but still, he can’t keep his eyes off her. 

She must feel something of his stare because she looks up, stops moving, holds herself still like she’s on the edge of something, like she’s waiting for permission to keep going. Daryl turns back to the gun he’s cleaning. It’s uncommon, but sometimes parents do sit out while their kids play. _Sometimes_ they hang around the car park for three hours rather than leave and come back. She’s a mouse, she’d get lost in the long grass of the arena anyway.

“It’s okay that I’m here, right?” her voice, close by, startles him and he drops the rag he’s using to clean. “I’m sorry, I’ll...” 

“Naw, it’s fine,” he mutters, squinting at her. “You’re good.” 

“Right,” she smiles at him. Her eyes are a very light grey blue, like clouds before a storm, wary and a little sad. She checks her watch, tugs nervously at a sleeve, and the fabric of her dishwater coloured shirt shifts, exposing a handspan bruise across her collarbone, deep purple and yellowed at the edges, and suddenly everything he’s seen of her makes sense to him. She notices him noticing of course and her face goes hard, her eyes steel up, and _that’s_ unexpected. There is metal down her spine, just a thread of it, but recogniseable. Maybe not right for cotton wool and a shelf after all. But the steel is gone in an instant and she’s a mouse again and spinning on her heel, adjusting her clothing, moving quickly back to her car.

Daryl doesn't move, he picks up the rag, pulls it between pinched fingers, goes back to cleaning. 

The woman sits in her car. She keeps the door open, she fiddles with the radio for awhile before switching it off completely, she checks her watch obsessively. Daryl watches her do this out of the corner of his eye. He feels like death and his hand are trembling some and the instant coffee he sculled in the morning isn't sitting well but he wants to _help_ this woman. Maybe it’s because he feels bullied, by Merle, by the world. Maybe it’s because he saw that thread of steel in her. Or because her eyes are beautiful. Or because he’s bored. He walks over to the car, her hand darts out to the handle of the door, ready to pull it closed, and Daryl pauses, slows down some. He almost puts his hands out, palms down, like he’s approaching some scared, wild animal, but people have come at him like that before and it always pissed him off.

“You wanna shoot somethin’?” he asks her and she blinks, frowns. “Get some aggression out, y’know?” 

She looks startled by the suggestion and is shaking her head before he’s finished asking it. 

“No...thank you,” she says quietly and he nods, shoves his hands in his pockets, turns and heads back to the rest of the guns that need cleaning. It was a stupid suggestion anyway, she was a stranger in bruises, quiet, not as angry as he thought she ought to be, but he hadn't any right to think she ought to be anything. 

When the children come back, dirty and bruised and happy, the woman leaves her car, walks quickly to a smiling girl with auburn hair and her face smeared in green paint, hugs her close. She does everything a mother should, holds her child at arms length for an inspection, licks a finger, rubs at the paint on her nose, laughs when the girl swipes her away. She is sweetness and light and her eyes aren't storms anymore, they are bright sunshine. Daryl has blurred memories of his mother doing this when he was young but it’s more than likely he just saw it on T.V. The cop is grinning and thanking Michonne and Andrea, shaking their hands, the perfect dad too, probably. Daryl scowls. 

Before they leave, the woman looks at him, just for a moment, and then looks away just as quickly. A flash like lightning or a sudden downpour, water on clear glass. It unsettles him, the stillness of her gaze, makes him curl his fingers into his palms, and he shakes his head to clear it, decides he definitely is leftover drunk, and goes to set the frat group’s field up.


	2. Chapter 2

The supermarket has always been a daunting place for Daryl. He’d learned to fend for himself from Merle whose idea of a meal was a peanut butter sandwich to pad out whatever drugs he was on at the time. So when he shops he always leaves with a haphazard assortment of food that isn't really designed with a balanced diet in mind. Bacon, always, tins of peaches, a thousand kinds of cereal that he almost always let get stale, steaks that he slathers in cheap, bottled barbecue sauce and overcooks without exception, terrible frozen meals with pictures of what real food is _supposed_ to look like on the box, and an excessive amount of chocolate. Merle laughs at him for that, only girls on their periods eat so much chocolate, he says, but it’s one small rebellion that Daryl holds fast to. 

He’s already been stuck there for too long. His usual brand of instant coffee is out of stock and something about the sheer number of options has caught him up short. His fingers twitch at his sides, his head sizzles with a vague sort of misplaced anxiety that soon turns into irritation. There are too many _things_ , he just wants something to wake him up in the morning. It pisses him off so badly that he doesn't even get coffee in the end, just a box of beer and a handful of chocolate bars. He carries the box with the chocolate balanced on top and he moves rapidly through the store to get to the line, snaking between people, his eyes on the lino in front of his feet. It’s Wednesday mid-morning, it’s empty enough that he can do that without too much worry. People tend to get out of his way pretty fast anyway. But this time someone doesn't and he’s so wired, so twitchy, so annoyed that he’s already been in the place for twenty minutes, that he crashes right into them. The chocolate scatters to the ground and it’s only the white-knuckled grip he has on the beer that keeps it from following suit. 

“Shit, watch it,” he spits and then he looks up, and it’s _her_. She’s flushed red and wide eyed and ruffled, clutching a basket full of all sorts of wholesome food-for-children, and staring at him like he’s grown an extra head. He staggers backwards like she’s pulled a gun on him, almost slipping on the lino. “ _Shit_ ,” he says again.

She doesn't move, her eyes flick down to the box at his arms and then to the chocolate on the floor, and she puts her basket down. Carefully, she picks up everything he’d dropped. With his arms still full and his mind stuck fast on the fact that it’s her, he can only watch. She places the chocolate bars back on top of the beer box, her lips pursed, a frown creasing her forehead, and turns back to pick up her own basket, taking the place ahead of him in line. He knows he should thank her but his tongue is thick in his mouth and he’s still fixed on being irritated and the words stick in his throat. Part of him wants to drop everything he’s holding and high tail it out of there, but he doesn't. 

She’s wearing a shirt with a higher neck, he notices, the bruise is better hidden this time. Her neck is bared to him and he stares at the soft curls that hit her nape. He wonders what other bruises she has, scattered over her body like paint, and his hands tighten on the box and he bites his lip to keep from asking her. He notices too the way her shoulders are tensed, and he knows it’s him that has frozen her. He knows that feeling, being thrown for a loop, anything outside of routine making your heart beat fast and your palms sweat, even something so small as seeing someone you recognise in a place you don’t expect to. A stranger. No one. Even something so small as your favourite coffee brand being out of stock. It makes every other impossible, terrible thing seem more likely. 

“Those things’ll kill you, you know, chocolate and beer,” she says to him quietly, turning back while her groceries are bagged, tilting her head slightly. He knows she is smiling because she has to not because she wants to. The tension doesn't leave her shoulders, her whole body is held like a coiled spring, but she’s playing nice. “At least it’s dark chocolate.” 

He’s holding the box so tight to his chest it almost hurts but he manages a shrug, a quirk of his lips. Eye contact has never been easy for him and when she doesn't get whatever she wants out of her comment, she turns away. Part of him wants to yell at her, _scream_ at her for making him uncomfortable in a place he already hates. This mouse, this stranger. Another part of him, a smaller part he tells himself, wants to tell her everything will be okay. He has scars too. 

“Offer still stands,” he blurts out instead, just as she’s about the leave, the words creeping up his throat like insects. When she turns to face him her expression is wary. “If you ever wanna...shoot something, come see me. Free of charge.” 

She smiles at him again and this time it hits like sunstrike and then she’s gone, clutching her grocery bags to her chest.

At work, Merle is back, relaxed and stretched-limb easy like he always is. The cat with the cream. The cat with his eyes so hooded it can’t be natural. The cat with the serious drug habit. He has an office, a chair on wheels, and he spends most of his time spinning around in it, kicking his legs out in front of him. He’s never used the guns, never lead any group through the fields. He’s the owner’s favourite and besides, _he_ has more important things to think do. 

“You ain't doing the cop, right?” Daryl asks, slouching into the chair Merle has set up in front of his desk. 

“Do I look like an idiot?” Merle drawls, rolling his eyes skyward. “No, we’re not going to steal from a cop.” 

Daryl shrugs, kicks his feet up onto the desk, grins when Merle swipes lazily at him. 

“Anyway I thought you were out of our...extracurriculars.” 

It’s the owner who’d set it up, Philip Blake. He calls himself an _entrepreneur_ but really he just has very safe (and very vague) ways of selling stolen goods. Merle is his right hand man, Merle picks targets, usually from the sheaf of paper waivers people fill out before they’re given a paintball gun. Merle breaks into houses. Merle knows exactly what to take. Daryl had been a part of it too, for awhile. He’d done everything Merle had asked him, for awhile. But there’d been too many close calls and Daryl has a record where Merle doesn't and he wasn't convinced that his brother would have his back if things went really wrong. Merle’d been somewhat cold toward him every since he stopped, but he’d been very cold toward him when he moved out of their shared place a couple of years ago too. He’d get over it. 

“I am,” Daryl says. “Just curious.” 

“There’s some others though, with that group,” Merle says. “We had to get permission slips for all the kids ‘cause they’re under eighteen. There’s almost twenty parents to choose from, lot of ‘em cops too, but a lot of ‘em not.”

Daryl nods, leans back in his chair to look at the ceiling. The woman would have filled out one of those forms. A name, an address, a phone number. He’d never really felt guilty about what he and his brother did, or at least he was good at burying it, but something twists uneasily in his stomach this time. 

“All friends with cops, though,” he says carefully.

“True that,” Merle sighs. He spins lazily in his chair, lights a cigarette, blows smoke rings. A dragon sat on a pile of gold. 

“There was a woman there had been hurt by someone, I think,” he doesn't know why he says it, he doesn't know why he’d ever say anything about that woman, or too her, or for her. She had steel in her, she ought to be using it herself. 

Merle’s eyes snap straight to his, his expression is like a storm rolling in, cold and furious. They’re both thinking of their father, of bruises and scars, the marks they’d seen on their mother, fingerprints around her neck, the same things he’d seen on the woman. Neither of them mention it, of course. Merle gets up, stalks over to the open box of beers he has lying on the floor in the room’s corner, pulls two out and hands one to Daryl. 

“So what?” he asks, opening the beer, dropping the bottle cap to the floor. 

“So nothin’,” Daryl spits back, following suit. The beer is warm and Merle is looking at him like he has too many secrets to count. _Merle_ thinks blood shouldn't have secrets. Merle who tells him almost nothing. “Just somethin’ I noticed.” 

It’s dropped after that. Merle would be suspicious at any more questions and Daryl has no reason to be asking any. He hopes Merle doesn't pick her from his pile of paper. The nameless, beaten, mouse. He hopes the steel isn't burnt out of her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I told you this would be ridiculous *supermarket awkwardness intensifies*


	3. Chapter 3

Daryl is sitting in the long grass at the edge of one of the paintball fields. He drags the blades through his fingers then presses his palms into the dirt. Michonne and Andrea are zombies, lurching and moaning down the paddock’s length, unable to keep straight faces for long. Michonne calls it training, they've got no groups booked in that day but the cop’s kid had made some snot-nosed comment when she’d been getting him all made up in gore and she hadn't been able to let it go. _**Real** zombies don’t move like that. **Real** zombies crash into stuff that’s in their way_. She’d been trying to get everyone to practice all week and so far only Andrea had accepted the challenge. Daryl pulls the petals off flowers. 

They’re the only people he really interacts with at work about from Merle, the zombie girls, though there are others. The Greene girls who keep everything safe, fixing up the platforms hidden in trees for the stealth run, making sure the nets that cover the bases at the ends of each field have no holes and the visors on the helmet aren't scratched to shit and thick with old paint. Glenn and Tara, the marksmen, they take the really hardcore people through runs, the ones who'll treat a paintball arena like a warzone the ones who are most likely to get violent if they don’t come in first. Daryl helps out with all of it, everyone does really, there aren't officially allocated responsibilities, but they’re still split and he almost always ends up with the zombie girls. He doesn't mind it, they’re alright, stone cold bitches, but alright. They let him sit in the grass instead of staggering around under mud and paint in the fierce hot sun.

“All they have is hunger,” Michonne is saying to Andrea, pointless information, _the philosophy of the zombie_. “You gotta look _hungrier_.” 

Daryl can’t remember the last time he was hungry for anything. Maybe deadhead zombies have more of a point than he does. He tears up a clump of grass then pushes it back down into the earth, folding the leaves flat. He used to think he just wanted whatever Merle did, his brother who kept him alive, the only blood he’d been dealt out that hadn't ended up dead. Merle told him that. Dixon’s weren't thinkers, Dixon’s got things done. Daryl was nothing, but at least he was nothing with a family. Now Merle is strange around him, paranoid and cold and wound up tight, too caught up in what his boss has him doing and what his drugs have him doing to remember he has a brother. Daryl knows that if he asks him Merle will spin it some other way. _**You** left brother, **you** did that, you’re the one that don’t care for family_. Maybe its true, maybe Daryl stopped caring for family when their mother died, he doesn't know, he only knows he’d been scared of how deep Merle was going. Scared that he was so weak he would follow until he had no way of getting out. He’d drown in drugs and violence where Merle always floated, a charmed life, so naturally _good_ at criminal behaviour he’d never get caught.

Still, without Merle he’s aimless, a rabid dog cut loose. Nothing to do but tear up grass and think on family and carefully not think on the woman who had smiled at him so brightly at a supermarket exit. 

“Daryl, come and show Andrea how to look hungry,” Michonne calls to him, jolting him out of his thoughts. He raises his middle finger at her, lies back in the grass.

They come over to him of course, peering down at him like a pair of hell-sent angels, faces smeared in paint. He drapes an arm over his eyes to hide them from view. They slump down on either side of him and he shuffles slightly like he can fold in on himself just a little bit, tuck in his edges, make himself smaller. At least they know not to touch him. 

“I ain't gettin’ painted up if that’s what you want,” he mumbles into his forearm. “It’s too hot for this shit.” 

“You’d look the same anyway,” Andrea says. “You always look half dead.” 

Daryl doesn't reply, he squints up at the sky, pure blue, not a cloud in sight. He thinks she’s probably right. He pulls his elbow in even closer to his side, presses the back of his wrist into the socket of his eye.

“You come all the way over her to insult me?” he mutters. “Didn’t Merle give you somethin’ to do while we got no groups? Why can’t you do it away from me?”

Michonne sighs, a great, long suffering thing that rattles through her chest, then she gets to her feet. Andrea stands up too and looming over him, in unison, they shake their heads like demented twins who think he’s the biggest disappointment in their lives. They disappear quickly, Daryl doesn't know where, probably to moan and groan and stagger over hills some more, insane as it is. It’s their _job_. The zombie girls. He shuts his eyes.

He lies there until the sun gets so bright that when he opens his eyes black spots are stamped over his vision. The sky looks technicolour, so bright it’s unreal. He thinks he’s probably sunburnt. Microwaved to chapped and peeling redness by the neon sun. He gets to his feet, heads slowly back to the office and the parking lot, halfheartedly scraping the dirt from underneath his fingernails and from the folds of skin at his knuckles. He drags his feet, he pulls at pieces of grass that are high enough for his fingertips to brush.

There’s a car he doesn't recognise parked on the gravel and immediately he thinks it’s going to be someone from a nightmare. Some guy of Merle’s come to settle a debt or cause a scene or tear down walls. The skies will darken and rain will fall and Merle will show up with handfuls of lightning to throw. But its not. There’s a person leaning against the door of the car and as he gets closer he realises it’s her. The mouse. She is all in washed out grey in the bright sun and it only makes the black and yellow of her bruised eye stand out more. It’s swollen half closed and the white is stained bloody. He keeps moving until he’s a few feet away from her, he knows enough not to move closer, even though he wants to. He’s stunned by how brutal the injury looks against her delicate features. But her expression isn't delicate at all. It’s that thread of steel, wild and fierce and hard as diamonds. She tilts her chin as he moves nearer, presses her lips together, and _brandishes_ the bruise at him like it’s a medal she’s won. A decoration.

“I wanna shoot something,” she tells him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! This chapter is called Daryl-feels-sorry-for-himself.


	4. Chapter 4

Her name is Carol. She tells him this as they walk across the parking lot and she twists the wedding ring on her finger. Her voice is steady and clear but he can tell she’s nervous. Her fingers plait themselves together and apart and together in front of her and she twists the ring again and he knows those sorts of gestures, knows how to use them and why, like repetition will ward off evil. Some people use rosary beads or guitars or paintbrushes. Some people use the triggers of guns and the grips of hunting knives. Carol uses her hands and Daryl does too. 

“Daryl,” he tells her, barely a word, his name blurred into a flick of the tongue. Her fingers pull free of themselves and she holds her hand out for him to shake and he ignores it, keeps walking, and she doesn't miss a beat.

He takes her out the back of the office to the small patch of grass staff usually keep to when they’re on a break. There’s a target set up for practise, for fun, a man’s torso set twenty five feet away, splattered in garish paint and dirt. Carol looks at it for a long time, her face impassive, and he waits for her to settle herself before handing her the gun. She holds it like it’s something she’s afraid of and then, with very deliberate movements, she firms her grip and loses her fear, holds it tighter, raises it to her shoulder like she was born knowing how to.

“If you ask me about my eye I’ll lie to you,” she tells him as she squints down at the target. She says it so _casually_ , like they were talking about a movie they’d both seen or where to buy the best coffee in town. 

Daryl doesn't say anything, doesn't think there’d ever be anything he could say to that, just shrugs and hands her a pack of ammo. She peers at the small container of plastic balls curiously, pulls out a yellow one and presses it between her thumb and forefinger until it bursts and the paint runs down her arm. She smiles. She pours the balls down into the paintball gun’s ammo chamber. 

“It’s point and pull really,” he tells her, nodding at the gun. “Just look down here, point it at what you wanna hit, an’ pull the trigger.” 

She’s fired a shot as soon as the words have left his mouth and a spot of bloody red blooms across the target’s chest. Daryl covers his grin with a hand. Carol turns to him, beaming, and the movement must hurt her eye because one of her hands flies to the bruise and her fingertips hover over the purpled skin, but she keeps smiling, smiling. 

“I almost...you filled out a form when you came here with your kid,” he tells her in the silence that follows, rubbing a hand over the bridge of his nose. “I almost looked you up an’ called you to come do this.”

Her expression is momentarily frightening, a flash of blank fear and defensive anger, but it’s gone in a second and then she just looks confused.

“ _Why_?” she asks him as she turns back to the target, takes careful aim, hits the silhouette’s shoulder in a splash of neon green. Daryl doesn't really know how to answer that either. His answer is the bruise on her eye, the one that crossed her collarbone, however many more there are on a thousand other woman. But he can’t tell her that, it’s not his place to be some well intentioned hero, and anyway, she knows already or she wouldn't have turned up with fresh bruises and a desire to do violence. He chews at the edge of his thumbnail, watches her as she shoots the target again, bright purple this time.

“What happened to your eye?” he asks her, and she spins back to him, swinging the gun with her so quickly he actually ducks and she lowers the weapon.  
“I fell down,” she tells him flatly and she turns back to the target, has emptied the chamber of the gun in less than a minute. The paint drips, all the colours run together into grey sludge. He gives her more ammo.

Andrea and Michonne pass them on their way out to the parking lot and they both slow down when they see what’s happening. It’s technically against the rules, letting members of the public out the back, and it’s definitely against the rules to let them use a gun without body armour or a helmet (or _payment_ ), and Andrea is frowning and Michonne has her hands on her hips and both of them look like they’re about to speak up. But Daryl shakes his head, a tiny movement, barely even a gesture, and Carol hasn't seen them yet and they watch for only a moment longer before leaving. Michonne scowls at him before they disappear, he’s disappointed them again, he’ll have to answer for it later, but at least he knows they won’t tell Merle. They’re on his team really, the zombie girls.

He leans against the wall to watch Carol shoot, steady and calm. He shoves his hands into his pockets to keep from fidgeting. She is sweating slightly, her hair curls at her temples, wet and dark, and she might be crying too, but he can’t tell and he doesn't ask. It’s not his place, none of this is really, he’s just given her somewhere to exist. When she’s finished with the second lot of paintballs she drags her hand across her face anyway, turns back to face him looking breathless and triumphant. He’d been thinking she might like to try a real gun but the look on her face changes his mind, she looks like she’s won something, and it’s entirely enough.

He walks her out to her car. Her fingers are twisted together again but her wedding ring is ignored this time. The hand and fingers of one arm are stained with yellow paint and she presses the fingers of her other hand into the colour like she’s trying to embed it there permanently. She stops when she gets to her car, turns back to him.

“My daughter’s name is Sophia,” she tells him like the words have been on the tip of her tongue this whole time, and as soon as he says it he knows that’s what she really uses to keep terror at bay. Her daughters name, not fingers tangled together or a wedding right twisted viciously or yellow paint or a paintball gun. Her daughter is her touchstone. Her daughter is what is keeping her alive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you thank you!


	5. Chapter 5

Daryl is sure she won’t be back. He’d let her shoot at a paper target for a couple of hours. It wasn't anything like rescuing the damsel in distress. He’s not a hero and he’s learned that women aren't often damsels either, even if they are in distress. She won’t be back because she’s scratched that itch, shaken that pebble from her shoe. Maybe it hadn't even been the shooting, maybe it had just been telling someone her daughters name, or twisting her wedding ring around her finger. Maybe she won’t come back because she’s gone and taken her daughter with her. 

He hopes so. 

That she had chosen to tell _him_ her daughter’s name presses on his mind. That she would trust him with something like that. All he can reason is that he’d been in the right place at the right time. She was probably frayed already and all she’d needed to break was a word from a stranger. He remembers Sophia vaguely, a rainbow shirt and bright hair. 

When she does show up, a couple of days later, he’s _angry_. She was supposed to be gone, wind; she was supposed to be impossibly strong after a couple of hours at a paper target. Strong enough to raise her middle finger to the man who hurt her and ride off into the sunset with her daughter by her side. _He_ hadn't been that, he had stayed at home until both of his parents had died, his mother fading into nothing like autumn leaves, his father burning out and vicious til the end. Carol was supposed to be stronger than he had been. This woman who had bruises he recognised. 

He’s packing up the dirty vests from a zombie run that’d just left when she pulls up in her car. She fumbles with the door before climbing out, carrying a chipped plate of something covered in cling film, and that almost makes him angrier. He hasn't _done_ anything for her. He’s handed her a gun, some plastic, some paint, and she hasn't done what she’s supposed to with them, she hasn't left. He wipes down another vest, dries it off, drops it into a box. Maybe if he doesn't look at her she’ll leave. 

“I made you cookies,” he hears her say, close to him, holding the plate out to him. 

He holds a vest tightly in both hands. 

“I can’t pay you. Ed would . . . I can’t have him knowing I’m here.”

“You’re gonna be here regular, then?” he snaps, harsher than he’d intended, really. Her face is bruised still, yellow and blue, curling away from her nose. He wonders why she hasn't tried to cover it with makeup, if she only keeps it uncovered for him. She looks startled and then defiant.

“If you’ll have me,” she says, pursing her lips like he hadn't raised his voice at all. She looks at the plate of cookies still in her hands. “They’re chocolate chip, for your sweet tooth.” 

Daryl doesn't know what to say. He tightens his hold on the vest, digs his fingernails into the nylon, drags his grip down a seam. He throws it down with the others and takes the plate off her, dropping it roughly onto the counter behind him. The cling film is misty with condensation, the cookies are warm still, he wants to crush the whole thing into dirt but he is caught on a breath escaping his lungs, an uncomfortable scrape at his throat, and he turns back to her.

“Thanks,” he grunts. “Come on.” And she follows him out the back.

“What happened to your eye?” he asks her when they’re an hour in and she’s pausing to reload the gun. 

“It was a baking accident,” she says and he almost smiles at how bitter she sounds, how angry, the biting steel in her. 

After that she comes twice every week. She brings baking most times, things with chocolate in them or peanut butter. Sometimes they eat them together, sat against the wall out back, the plate sat between them. She talks more than he does and he soon realises that he’s happy to listen. She tells him about Sophia: her grades, when she makes the junior swim team. She almost never mentions her husband, deliberately doesn't speak his name again. Her shooting gets better but he knows she isn’t there for accuracy or to hone some latent talent; she’s doing it for her itch and for her anger. 

She doesn't cry at all after the first time.

Michonne and Andrea notice at once. He tries to avoid talking to them about it for as long as possible, but they are relentless as always.

“You told Merle?” Andrea asks, her expression suggesting that she already knows the answer.

“You replacing supplies?” Michonne follows up, raising an eyebrow.

“‘m payin’ for it,” he lies and they exchange a glance loaded with all sorts of things Daryl would rather not know.

“Is this why you've been in such a good mood lately?”

Daryl shrugs. He can’t figure where they've got that, he’s treated them same as he always has. Maybe he’s been more open to taking their groups, but that’s only so he knows he can be free for whenever Carol comes around. 

“All it takes to make a Dixon sweet is a beautiful married woman to teach violence to,” Michonne muses. “That’s very interesting.” 

“Shut it,” Daryl mutters.

“Seriously though, she’s a dish,” Andrea waggles her eyebrows.

“A silver fox,” Michonne laughs.

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Daryl, are you the _other woman_?”

“I’m just lettin’ her shoot, fuck off,” he snarls and he leaves them laughing in his wake.

Carol brings Sophia one day and it scares him half to death. This slip of a girl with red gold hair and a smile like sunshine. A smile like her mother’s. She hides behind Carol and smiles nervously when they’re introduced. Daryl knows how she feels. He gets them all helmets and vests for safety this time, he _leads by example_. 

Carol doesn't always have bruises that he can see, but every time she does he asks her how it happened. 

“I tripped on a toy.”

“I slipped in the bathroom.” 

“I fell down.”

“I fell down.” 

“I fell down.”

He never offers a comment to her stories, just hands her more ammo and watches as she shoots the targets into oblivion. They make traditions out of trauma.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took forever I know, I am trash. Thank you to openmouthwideeye who is the best, the best, the best beta forever!!


	6. Chapter 6

“I’m a cleaner,” Carol tells him one day, her eyes trained on the target, her finger hovering over the trigger. “No one knows, not even Sophia. I clean her teacher’s houses in the morning.” 

“Plannin’ some great escape?” he asks without thinking and her mouth twists as she pulls the trigger.

“You've never told me anything about your family,” she says a beat later, glancing at him sideways. “You got anyone?” 

Daryl fidgets, licks a finger and picks up crumbs left over from the brownies she’d made that day. 

_You got anyone?_ The question is simple enough but it sits wrong with him, nudges at the weight he keeps held somewhere in his chest. Only recently he would've said Merle without hesitation. The brother that keeps him afloat. But he isn’t sure that’s true anymore. Not even as he works a job he’d gotten entirely based on Merle’s merits. He hasn’t seen his brother in months, no one has, and part of him is glad for it, because if he’d shown up while Carol was there he can only imagine what terrible shit might get dredged up. Another part of him is resigned to it because Merle is always disappearing and he never tells Daryl shit about where he goes (and a tiny, itchy, red raw part of him is hurt by it every time). The biggest part of him is angry. He chews on his thumbnail, licks sugar from the pads of his fingers.

“I got a brother,” he says finally, surprising himself. “Merle. He manages this place. He. . .ain’t around much.”

“Older or younger?” 

“Older.” 

“You got parents?” 

“Dead, both of em.” He scowls at the empty plate. “No kids neither. This interrogation got a point?” 

“Just making conversation.” She smiles at him, a teasing expression that makes him feel tied in knots. “You don’t have to tell me anything.” 

“Good.” 

Carol continues to shoot at the target, the corners of her mouth collecting smiles every time she hits. She looks much younger when she smiles; her eyes light up brightly, like she’s lit with sunshine even when she’s not. Her smiles have been coming easier every time he sees her. Or maybe he’s just more aware of them. 

They make her bruises seem even harsher. 

Suddenly he want to tell her about every tiny scrap of his life.

 _My Mom lit herself up with a cigarette and took the house down with her my dad drunk and drugged himself to death my brother runs with the kinds of criminals even I’d have nothin’ to do with and I-_

But more than that, he wants to tell her the truth.

_Dad burned mom and mom burned everything._

He shifts in his seat, drags his sticky palms across the thighs of his jeans. Her hands look soft on the gun, like they’d never been dirty, but he knows that can’t be true. No one with her life was spotless. His mom hadn't been; he’d seen blood under her fingernails. He’d seen a lit match in her hand. He wonders what kind of revenge Carol will get when she finally does.

“My brother breaks into houses,” he tells her after taking a breath, trying to inhale the steel she has lining her bones after every shot, like gunpowder would if she were using a real gun. “I used to, too. Don’t anymore. He’s into drugs. I ain't seen him in awhile.” 

Carol doesn't say anything, doesn't look away from her target - maybe squeezes the trigger a little more violently, maybe clenches her jaw, but Daryl could just be imagining it. He regrets telling her immediately. He doesn’t know how she squeezed it out of him. Like it was easy, like he’d spill his life story to her if she licked her lips. He probably would. Maybe he told her this small thing to keep from telling her the rest. 

There are bruises spanning her wrists like bracelets. 

“How’d you get them?” he demands, nodding at the injuries when the silence stretches too far. He wants to punish her for getting anything from him, pulling words from his mouth, especially words that tell her the truth about him. He’s worse than she is, he runs with people like the one who hurts her.

“I fought a monster,” she retorts, quick as a flash, and that’s a bit too close to the truth for either of them. Carol’s eyes shine; Daryl chews skin from his lip. He wonders if she thinks _he_ is a monster. 

But then she’s smiling again and her eyes still shine, and his mouth tastes like rust instead of sugar, but everything settles slowly back into sunshine. He hates it a little bit, that she can quiet him with a smile, but it feels good too.

He knows he has grown used to seeing her. She arrives at the same time, twice a week, chipped plates and cling film. She always looks fierce when she steps out of her car, like she has won a battle on her drive, and he hopes it hasn't cost her too much. When she brings Sophia she looks softer, and she talks to her little girl like she’s the whole world. It fascinates Daryl, really, the way she is with her daughter, the way his mom had never been. He would miss her if she stopped coming. 

He doesn't notice that he stops arguing when Michonne and Andrea tease him. That he stops denying everything point blank, full stop. _He_ doesn't notice, but they do.

The next day Daryl finds Merle in his office for the first time in months, like he knew his brother'd been talking about him. Merle is high as a kite, staring at the ceiling, his grin soft at the edges, lazy with melted brown sugar. Daryl sits in the chair across the desk as always, just a member of staff talking to the big boss, a kid talking to his big brother. He rolls cigarettes to keep his hands busy, empties his tobacco pouch and fills it back up. He drinks beer and for some reason Merle thinks that’s hilarious, and he laughs intermittently and scuffs his boots across the floor. He doesn't tell Daryl where he’s been.

“You know I was thinking on that house wife you told me about,” he says after a while, and Daryl’s fingers pause on a roll. “ A housewife ain't police and that one’s hardly even friends with police. Me and the boys might give her a call. You in?” 

Daryl drops his half rolled cigarette back into the pouch, tucks it into his pocket, picks up his beer and takes a long pull before he responds. He needs to slow himself down or he’ll get too fast, get to somewhere he can’t remember coming from: bloody knuckles or a black eye or broken glass. Merle laughing. 

“Pick someone else, Merle,” he says quietly. His hands are shaking. He stretches his fingers out and curls them back up. “She ain't rich.” 

“Naw, but she’ll have something squirreled away - those beatdown types always do.” 

Daryl is on his feet at that, and when he gets there he doesn't know what to do. He sways; he burns. Merle watches him with his lazy, shit eating grin and Daryl’s bones creak with the effort it takes to keep from lunging forward. 

“Don’t fucking do it,” he manages, his voice strained with frustration. It would be easier if he was just angry. He’s used to being angry. If he was angry he’d attack Merle and Merle’d beat his ass but it would be _easy_. But this is more than that and he doesn't know how to deal with the way his voice jars at his ears and the way Merle’s smile widens like he knows something.

“Chill bro, I’m kidding,” he says, holding his hands out, palms down. _Pacifying_. 

Daryl leaves. 

Outside, he kicks at the gravel of the parking lot, loses his footing and almost falls. His cheeks burn and the back of his throat aches. He feels young and dumb and red hot angry. He feels a little bit like turning back too. Barging into Merle’s office and hauling him to his feet and breaking his knuckles on his brother’s face. But he knows he won’t, he isn't brave enough. Merle had been joking, it was a _joke_ , it didn't matter. He shoves his hands into his pockets instead, and heads across the parking lot to his car.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Thank you especially to openmouthwideeye beta queen, all around cool person, and the reason this isn't total nonsense.


	7. Chapter 7

At ten years old, Daryl builds himself a bike. He scavenges pieces from the junkyard and from neighbourhood kids with newer, better bikes, and when it’s finished it’s a patchwork piece of metal and rubber but it works fine and Daryl loves it. He has it for a month before Merle, who is fifteen, backs over it in their dad’s pickup. Daryl doesn't say anything, he takes the passenger seat of the truck instead.

At thirteen years old Daryl kisses a girl with freckles and Merle teases her so mercilessly that she never speaks to either of them again. Daryl doesn't speak to her either. He counts the mould spots on the ceiling when he lies in bed, like they’re just freckles on wood instead of skin. He’s the lookout for Merle and his friends after that, when they break into liquor stores and 7-Eleven’s. He cultivates signals and passwords so he can pretend it’s a game, glass smashes, the older boys laugh. 

Eventually Daryl figures it out, the destructive ways that Merle goes about keeping him close. He’s being a brother in the only way he knows, and Daryl responds in kind by doing exactly what Merle expects him to. It works for awhile, living together in the beat-down two bedroom wreck left to them by their beat-down wreck of a father. They drink and play darts and Merle works on his motorbike and Daryl remembers that he had a bike once too. 

They love each other, in their way, but the relationship still rots and Merle doesn't notice but Daryl does. He keeps very carefully quiet about it, like if he ignores it in just the right way it will disappear, like acknowledging it will only make it worse, like Merle’s a dog who hasn't been fed in year and he might take your hand off if you don’t make every right move. 

It’s Philip Blake that turns rot into bones and a starving dog into a rabid one. 

Daryl never meets him, he’s a shiny black car with tinted windows, he’s a voice on the telephone that keeps Merle out all night and up to his eyeballs in drugs. Before Philip Blake, they’d both dabbled in illicit substances. Everyone they knew smoked weed and sometimes Daryl bought nos canisters and balloons because he liked the sounds it made behind his eyes, and once Merle half assed cooking mescaline with a cactus but mostly it just made them throw up. They never really devolve into anything serious. Not until Philip Blake introduces Merle to heroin and it swallows him whole.

Blake gives Merle addictions and a paintball arena and Merle gives Daryl a job. Two jobs really. Daryl drives the getaway car when they smash and grab. Daryl smokes obsessively and taps his fingers across the steering wheel. Daryl gets five percent and some of whatever they’re drinking at the time. 

It takes two years for him to get angry enough to leave. He moves into a beat-down apartment closer to town and all it does is make Daryl feel empty instead of angry, and Merle turn cold. He gets out of the getaway driving too and Merle blacks his eye and doesn't speak to him for a week and Daryl tells himself it doesn't matter. They’re still brothers, they’ll always be blood. He doesn't acknowledge that really he’s waiting for the catch, like the bike run over, like the girl tormented. He’s waiting for Merle to reel him back in.

When Carol comes back a couple of days after he’d stormed out of Merle’s office, it’s the first time he really hasn't wanted her there. She smiles at him across the parking lot, shades her eyes against bright sunlight, and she looks like something he’d never be able to touch, and he wishes she would leave. 

“You know I got actual work to do,” he tells her when she gets near enough to hear. She hesitates and he can almost see the wheels turning in her brain, like she’s working out if he means something other than his words. 

“I think you’d kick me out if you really wanted to,” she says finally, her smile turning smug, impish, irritatingly knowing. He doesn't say anything, he heads out the back and she follows him just like always.

Daryl fidgets while Carol sets herself up. She doesn't have any baking this time. The bruises at her wrists are still there. Yellowed and fading, but still there. She pours the paintballs into the chamber at the top of the gun and Merle is in his head telling him he’ll take her for everything she’s worth. _She’ll have something squirrelled away - those beatdown types always do_. She raises the gun to her shoulder and suddenly Daryl is angry. 

“Where’d you get those?” he asks her quietly, nodding at the bruises that are still there at her wrists.

“Slammed my hand in the car door,” she says easily, without looking at him, her finger settles on the trigger.

“Yeah? Both of ‘em? You’re a fucking liar,” he snarls, unable to stop himself. 

She freezes, her hands turn brittle on the gun. He watches her profile, her eyelashes shivering, her lips parting. She turns to him and her expression is a terrible mix of hurt and confusion and fear and he thinks he never wants to see anyone look at him like that again.

“‘m . . . sorry,” he mumbles, ashamed already, scared too. He takes a step back, away from her.

She leaves anyway, says goodbye in a voice soft as ash, gets in her car and drives away before she’s even fired one shot. 

The target looks clean and whole standing out in the grass. Daryl destroys it. He breaks it apart almost methodically, like it’s made of cotton wool or clouds, and he kicks at the wooden frame too until it splinters and frays, and then he tears at the staples buried there still until the skin on his fingertips peels. 

He is so intent on destruction that he doesn't hear Michonne and Andrea arrive, doesn’t notice them at all until they’re pulling him away from the broken wreck that used to be a practice target. They are yelling too, angry words, worried ones, and he shrugs them off immediately, stalks back to the deck, slides down the wall until he’s sitting with his head resting against his arms. He chews at the skin on his fingers, scraped loose in his anger.

“What the _fuck_ ,” is the first thing he really hears and it come from Andrea of course and he ignores her, grinds his knuckles into the ribbed decking. 

“Wanting to fuck a married woman doesn't mean you can destroy work property,” Michonne carries on and he does look up at that. 

Her words wriggle their way into his brain slowly and then settle there like dead weight and he doesn't . . . he can’t . . . he opens his mouth, closes it again, clenches his jaw so tight it hurts, and scowls at the pair who are scowling right back at him.

Michonne presses her hand to her forehead like she’s in pain. 

“He doesn't even realise he’s pining,” she tells Andrea, like he’s not there.

Part of him wants to scream out concrete and steel, flat out denials and withering scorn, but he can’t get the words out. And anyway, another part of him is still stuck on the weight Michonne’s words have added, settling somewhere in his chest. They’re wrong, _fucking_ isn't what he’s looking for, not really, but they’re right too, probably, maybe. He settles into a sort of strangled silence where he decides it doesn't even matter because Carol’s gone, and the zombie girls decide it doesn't even matter because Daryl’s such a hopeless case.

“Grow up, Daryl,” Andrea sighs. 

“Not everything has to be quite so dramatic,” Michonne agrees, eyeing up the remains of the target.

“Shit,” Daryl mutters, passing a hand over his eyes. “ _Shit_.” 

The girls laugh at him but they do it in such a fond way that he has to stop scowling. They drag screaming kids through a zombie run together and getting disgustingly filthy makes him feel a little bit better about how pristine Carol’s target had remained. Except that he isn’t thinking about Carol’s anything, because he can’t, because he shouldn’t, and he thinks instead about how Merle’s probably pissed at him for storming out and how he’ll probably have to do something to fix that.

Later, in his apartment, he drinks warm beer and chocolate until it’s way past dark. He is still determined not to think about Carol. Carol with hands like the wings on a bird, Carol with eyes like sun on water. Carol who he should scorn for being so weak, a mouse, except that she’s not. Carol who stands tall with a paintball gun in her hands, Carol with a spine of steel. 

“Carol who-” he starts, rolling her name over in his mouth, and then the phone is ringing and it startles him so badly he drops his bottle and has to move quickly to tip it up again. 

“Daryl,” her voice comes through, hissed and scared. _Her_ voice. “Daryl, someone is in my house.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait again.. i wish I could say it won't happen again but that is....unlikely. Anyway. Thank you!!

**Author's Note:**

> SO. Basically I was thinking about another fic I've written for a different fandom where I made the real canon setting...nicer? Sort of? In this case, we've got zombies, we've got guns, but not really. I'm ripping myself off sort of though. I want to say this is fluff but it's not really, it will be, later, but right now, not so much. We'll see. Anyway, thank you for reading!


End file.
